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Song Of The Day 11/20/2015: Shango – “Day After Day (It’s Slippin’ Away)”

The Hidden '60s, Part 3 – This cheerfully fake calypso item refers to the popularly held belief that shifting tectonic plates around the San Andreas Fault will cause the state of California to detach from the continental shelf and fall into the ocean. That's not really the truth, at least as far as we can predict. Although in a relatively short time in terms of geological age Los Angeles and San Francisco will become adjacent cities, which will take some of the zip out of the Dodgers-Giants rivalry. They're saying the same kind of thing about us in the Pacific Northwest, except to hear others tell it everybody west of Interstate 5 is going to go through some serious Mad Max shit in the very near future. We are absolutely screwed. Everything's going to go wrong. We will see things we've never seen before and thought we never would. The Space Needle will topple over and impale that statue in front of the Seattle Art Museum. Wide-mouth bass will start throwing fishmongers at the market. Seattle Weekly will win a Pulitzer. Jeff Bezos will give to a charity. It'll be nuts. I'm going to go hide.

Sorry, didn't mean to turn this into us-us-us. The point is, the rumors about Cali tipping into the ocean are untrue, until they aren't. As for Shango, this song (#57, 1969) was their only detectable moment of pop existence, but it's clever enough. There are some fun asterisks about Shango. Their leader and co-songwriter on this was Tommy Reynolds, who later was the Reynolds in Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds. They had a soft-rock standard with "Don't Pull Your Love" ("out on me baby"). Reynolds left well before their next biggest hit "Fallin' In Love" ("baby baby fallin' in love, I'm fallin' in love again"), but they never took Reynolds out of the band name. The brand had already been established. Also in Shango, and also one of the co-writers of this song, was Stuart Margolin, the Emmy-winning character actor probably most famous for playing Angel on The Rockford Files. It's on Netflix. That's not a suggestion, it's an order.